A dash of Lime! (Limewire)

Member Name: ssbarker

Product:	Limewire
Date:	21/06/04 (8587 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Performance, Ease of Installation

Disadvantages: None

Let?s face it, Limewire is there for one thing only, to allow folk to download music and files for free! There must be a price, well yes there is. This is that you allow other people to upload your files.

So functionally it has to allow a user to search, find, and then download new music, video, etc. etc. Not an extremely complicated brief. But LimeWire does meet these needs, and meets them extremely well.

On the competition front LimeWire is up against a myriad of other P2P programs. The only two I have experience of are Kazaa (avoid, adware, etc) and Kazaa Lite (no adware here!). So my comments are made with this in mind.

Download and set-up
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Downloading from limewire.com is a snap. It should take mo more than 15 mnutes on a dial-up line. Installation is also easy, it sets itself up with minimal input from the user. You will have to have Java enabled, Limewire have thought of this and there is a link from their website for a JVM.

Performance
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At first I was a little disappointed at the performance (K-Lite foud more files and faster as well). But a tweak of Limewire?s configuration soon sorted that out. I found that ensuring the Ultrapeer function being enabled helped with this, but do not understand why. The search is easy to use and you can run a number of searches in parallel.
Once a file is found it is easy to select one for download. The transfer of files from your P2P chums, is really good. I managed to get a number of relatively obscure tracks (Canterbury Scene from 1970?s) in less than 15 minutes. Which I thought was exceptional.
The free version is pretty good. The paid for Pro version claims to be faster, but I have not compared the two to be able to give an opinion.

Functionality
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The user interface is simple. Simple is good. Uncluttered screens presenting relevant data. A great deal better than Kazaa or K-Lite. I like the way
that you can drill into your search results to pick out a particular artist, album, etc (This feature has been in the latest couple of versions).
The ability to chat with other P2P?ers and also search their files is great. The odds are that if you find a track from a particular user that you like, they will have more. So go and find out!

Summary
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Great little app. that will be used by me for some time to come.

Summary: